Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 9

The Deep Future

Over on the speculative evolution forum, Science Meets Fiction asked this cool question: “What might life look like if it had ten times as much time to develop since its world’s equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion?”

I can’t do it justice, but – what do you know – I tried anyway. Here goes:

This experiment seems to show that evolution doesn’t hit an asymptote and stop. Even in a completely unchanging environment, while there are diminishing marginal returns to optimization, they never diminish to zero. And then of course at some point the organisms themselves will start changing the environment.

1) That’s one way to go: on a very old world, all big environmental changes are biogenic. A mere asteroid impact doesn’t do nearly as much damage as the native life.

Evolutionary biologists slap you on the wrist if you talk about trends, but I’m going to anyway One trend (noted by Stephen Jay Gould) is an increasing difference between the least and the most complex organisms. There is a minimum viable complexity and organism can have and still be called “alive,” but no maximum exists. Over time, simple chance will result in a longer and longer tail on the distribution graph in the direction of increased complexity. The same might be true for size, as well. A billion years ago, we only had microbes. Now we have microbes, blue whales, the Humongous Fungus, and Pando the aspen grove.

2) on a very old world, there are some very big organisms

A similar trend (or a result of the same trend) is increasing diversity and decreasing disparity. More and more species share a more and more recent common ancestor. In the Cretaceous, there were no plankton-eating aquatic mammals, no grazing mammals, no flying mammals, but there were multituberculates and triconodonts in addition to today’s placentals, monotremes, and marsupials. There were also gondwanatheres, docodonts, and morganucodonts, which lie outside of “mammalia” entirely! They all looked like small furry scampering things (low diversity) but they were less closely related than a squirrel is to a lion (high disparity).

3) Extend that into the future and every land animal is (for example) a kind of house mouse. Maybe EVERYTHING is a house mouse, from microbes (transposons and much-simplified transmissible tumor cells?) to forests (lots of endosymbiosis events).

Another trend is the creation of new niches. In the Cretaceous there were no grazers because there were no large grasslands. In the Cambrian, there were no large land plants at all, and therefor no ecosystems depending on them. It’s hard to imagine all that land area going to waste, but here in the Holocene we have low-productivity deserts, mountaintops, enormous volumes of ocean water, and even wilder, more barren places like the deep crust and the upper atmosphere.

4) More complex ecosystems in more places.

Thermodynamically, you can think of the Earth turning progressively more and more sunlight into waste heat. One way to think about deep future ecosystems is to imagine them becoming more and more efficient at collecting energy and sequestrating biomass.

5) Biogenic dyson-spheres? Kardishev III ecosystems?

And what about intelligence? I’ve been toying with the idea of an optimistic* deep future for intelligent life, where rather than destroying itself, it just keeps growing in complexity.

6) Everything on future Earth didn’t evolve from house-mice. Everything evolved from humans.

*optimistic if you like humans

Paul and Dan on The Book of Joy

Paul and Dan on The Book of Joy (by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams)

We talk about my cancer, faith as foundational to hope and hoping for faith, Paul and my different religious backgrounds, faith as a companion, nuclear war and worst possibilities, and choices (more on them next week).

#video #danielmbensen #paulvenet #dalailama #dezmondtutu #thebookofjoy #bookreview #cancer #health #paulanddan #mentalhealth #motivation #religion #spirituality #death

February Newsletter: Congratulations, Your Nightmare Came True

(see posts like this a week earlier on my Patreon for $1 a month)

Our little blue car emerged from the tunnel and hummed up Botevgradsko Boulevard. To our left: a mural of chains melting off someone’s forearms. The kids were looking out the windows, there was nobody to interrupt us and nothing that needed cleaning, and I relished the ability to complete a thought.

“Ha!” I said.

“What?” asked Pavlina.

We stopped at a red light.

“Congratulations,” I said. “My nightmare came true. I’ve been called a racist on the internet.”

“Well, not exactly,” said Pavlina.

“Okay, I was called – ” I corrected myself, ” – my work was called ‘problematic’ in an email. That’s like halfway there. That’s a benchmark.”

“Yeah, okay. Congratulations.”

She wasn’t being sarcastic. We turned and headed south toward Mount Vitosha, and I burned with joy.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychologist Viktor Frankl talks about his brand of “logotherapy” in which he instructs an insomniac patient to go to bed with the intention of staying awake all night. If the patient doesn’t go to sleep, mission accomplished. If they do…you’re welcome. I’ve tried the trick and it worked1.

Writer’s block, too, crumbles when I commit myself to write as crappy a first draft as possible. John Swartzwelder talks about the “crappy elf,” who writes the first draft of his scripts, and Steven Pressfield tells us to follow our resistance. Change is frightening, and progress is change. As distinct from danger, fear is an excellent indicator of the direction of your next step.

How can I improve as an author? As an author, what am I afraid of? Put like that, the answer is easy: I’m afraid of being called a racist on the internet.

I’ve read about online mobs destroying writers’ careers. I’ve seen my friends and colleagues either give up on writing or else join a mob. I’ve leaned ever further toward giving up. I’ve never stopped writing, but I confess I didn’t work very hard on putting my work in front of other people. I dragged my feet. At critical moments, I conveniently forgot to mention that I had a book out lock myself in my tower and produce manuscripts that other people would sell. I thought I could keep my head down and still succeed.

It didn’t work. My soul searching last month revealed that my mission is to connect with people through telling stories. That means readership is a higher priority than sales, and that means I have to get out there and show people my work, even though that raises the risk I’ll get called out.

The first, easiest step was to join some forums, and to start participating more on the forums where I had previously lurked. I asked for (and received!) a great deal of help and advice. Then, in one of those conversations, my work got called “problematic.”

I was so angry, my hands shook. My defenses and counter-attacks boiled like bats around me. I wanted so much to write them all down in an email, but I didn’t. I vented my spleen in my notebook (in red pen no less) where nobody would see it. Then I shared the story with Pavlina and others. I shut the down the email conversation with a “thank you” to all involved, and I took steps to make sure that this wouldn’t happen again. I resolved to trust my feelings more, use voice rather than text for interviews with experts, and to be more honest earlier in the conversation (“that isn’t the story I want to tell”). I realized I’d gone to experts expecting praise and validation, which was unfair of me. Also, I put a stronger setting on my app-blocker. No email outside of email time.

That’s why I was so jazzed in the car five days later. I’d passed through the wall of fire, and it hadn’t burned me. I managed to write, even on the day my work got called problematic, and for each day thereafter. Some of the stuff I wrote was quite good. My nightmare had come true, and it felt great.

If my story got someone angry, it has a good chance of saving someone else. I haven’t yet been called a racist on the internet, but I’m well on my way. With any luck, I’ll get there soon.

In other news:

I recorded a series of videos with Paul Venet about Atlantis, a book about architecture, life, and the sea by Renzo and Carlo Piano. I wrote and thought a bit about the ghosts of Ghost of Mercy. And I kept on keeping on with the third (or “skin”) draft of Wealthgiver. I’m finding this draft is mostly about keeping straight the wants, decisions, and realizations of the characters, and making sure that what everybody is doing makes some sense. You may enjoy this bit of Wealthgiver worldbuilding.

I also read these Thoughts on Writing Serials, which gave me some good advice in addition to the answers I got about writing serial fiction from the generous people on the r/rational forum.

Things I read:

This delightful little story about getting investors (and asteroid mining)

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett — set a lovable crook to catch a robber baron (and reform the postal service)

This is my third or fourth re-read of Going Postal, and it was only this time that I recognized the allegory for the Financial Crisis (I already knew it was an allegory for web 2.0). Of course I enjoyed it immensely, especially the romance between two very un-paragonic people. I saw some of the seams this time (e.g. the transition between the romantic dinner and attack on the post office) but as always I value the glimpse into Pratchett’s process. I’m looking forward to re-reading Making Money, which I remember doing a better job of balancing the fantasy element with everything else.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier — I was There. You Should have Seen It!

It was a real education listening to You are Not a Gadget and Prattchett’s Going Postal at the same time. The author of the first could have been a character in the second. Lanier talks an awful lot about cephalopods, but he does pinpoint problems with the way we use computers and how to potentially solve them. I appreciate his philosophy that nothing computers do is meaningful until a human interacts with it. My biggest criticism of the book (aside from the part about cuttlefish) is its lack of coherence. It’s more like a series of blog articles, which I think that undermines Lanier’s point.

How Conversation Works by Anne Curzan — a bit too prescriptive

These lectures give us a good introduction to what you might call practical sociolinguistics. Curzan takes us through some of the mechanisms underlying conversations with the purpose of (after a period of painful self-consciousness) improving our skills at them. I got some good out of the lectures, but there are places where Curzan stops telling me how I talk and starts telling me how I ought to talk. I would have appreciated less “be careful not to X” and more “if you want Y, then you should Z.”

Illborn by Daniel T. Jackson — an attractive story poorly dressed

I read this in my effort to find a middle class of fiction: not life-changing, but fine as entertainment. Illborn fits: four young adults develop psychic powers and learn how to use them while the church hunts them down in fantasy medieval Europe. It has an excellent hook at the beginning, and while we don’t quite get what the prologue seems to promise, we do get something. The style is dull and plodding, but once I saw past the words and into the events they described, I really did care about the characters. There were a few times when I was transported into the world of the story, so there you go. Good book.

Superluminary by John C. Wright — Teleport the Andromeda Galaxy to defeat the Space Vampires

John C. Wright is a big ideas scifi author, but has a tendency to get silly. The Count to Infinity series is full of big ideas, and the Lost on the Last Continent series is too silly for me. Superluminary is somewhere in between. The discoverer of an alien artifact gets (technology that is indistinguishable from) magic, and uses it to set himself up as emperor of the solar system, with his children ruling over the planets, moons, and asteroids. Then, space vampires. I was disappointed when we never dug into the democratization of magic, and while there was some interesting zero-sum game theory going on with the vampires, again it was under-developed. But the plot moved along and one episode hooked into the next. Unlike the unimaginably ancient and malevolent un-life infesting the galactic core, I was satisfied.

See you next month

1 In combination of lifestyle changes and other new mental health habits. See more here.

Some Kind of Alien

This originally came from a GAN-generated image (here, 2nd row, 2nd from the right). I like the bauplan I came up with to make sense of the AI’s work:

Four limbs , one at each vertex of a rhombus, with another rhombus and its four limbs stacked on top of the first – the “tail” is the limb on the posterior vertex of the upper rhombus.

Spiracles in the armpits (where they should always go). Mouth between the lower four limbs.

Don’t ask me what the anterior limb with the patagium is for. Stabilization while skim-feeding?

~~~

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January Newsletter: Why????

This newsletter appeared first on my Patreon

So there I was again, crying in my writing chair.

Yeah, it’s going to be another one of those newsletters. Don’t worry, I come out of it okay.

I won’t go too much into the background, but in January I hit an author-career snag and didn’t know what to do about it. The day after I got the news, I sat down in my writing chair, not knowing how my next book was going to get out there, and I thought: why?

I wasn’t crying at that point.

As luck would have it, it was a Friday, the day I work on something other than my main project. I was free to do anything, so I did what I often do when I feel the angst rising: I wrote a poem.

I started using poetry when I was recovering from my cancer surgery. First it was haiku, which I developed into an automatic reaction whenever fear or worry threatened to overwhelm me. Look around you, catch hold of something beautiful, and describe it in 17 syllables. Focusing on beauty and forcing myself to count gave my panicking brain something to do.

This time, though, I was looking inward. And I didn’t write any other particular form. I just wrote what I was thinking. My first line was: “I’ll write something that nobody will want to read.”

Pretty clunky, and extremely self-absorbed, but I didn’t censor. Nobody would read this, after all.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to read it either. I’ll just tell you that I wrote a page laying out how I felt and why. Then I went back and read over it again, trying to juggle the words around so they’d sound good next to each other. I was curious what sort of rhythm and rhyme would emerge, and that curiosity spread. Why was it that I feel like I’d fallen through a crack in the earth? Why did I write? Why, having written, did I want other people to read my work?

And, more specifically and usefully: how would this story come out? What was the resolution to the opening problem?

I did come to a conclusion (“except the ones who need to”), but it wasn’t quite right. Yes, I did write for the one person who might need my story, but that wasn’t the whole truth. Plus that, the poetry wasn’t good. It didn’t work.

I remembered something Pavlina told me: a good storyteller says “welcome, sit down beside me. Have I got a story for you!” I also remembered some advice that Ethan Kross gives in Chatter: to gain some perspective on emotional experiences, talk about them in the 3rd or 2nd person. “He feels bad” is a lot less immediate than “I feel bad.” You can hold your thoughts out at arm’s length that way, and examine them.

I changed my first line to this:

“‘Nobody will see,’ he says to himself, feeding sticks to the fire he’s built behind walls.”

The emotions and rhythm snapped together. Suddenly, I was telling a story to myself. And the metaphor I was using suggested answers to my questions.

Why write? Because it warms me. Why share what I write? Because I want to be generous.

That’s when I started crying. It was an enormous relief to imagine someone sitting down at my fire. It was also frightening. Now I know that I have to write something that really works. It can’t just warm me, it has to warm someone else too.

In other news:

Geeze, a lot happened in January. I posted a new series of “Paul and Dan on” videos, this time about Cal Newport’s Deep Work. (I liked it, Paul didn’t).

Junction was briefly on sale (and it’s still pretty cheap).

The video of the Speculative Biology panel I moderated for Flights of Foundry was released on Youtube.

I finished the “meat” draft of Fellow Tetrapod (after deciding that it does indeed move) and put it away until September.

And! I started work on the skin draft of Wealthgiver! It took the second two weeks of January to re-write the scenes I had previously chucked  in my impatience to finish the last draft. Now I’m attacking the story from beginning to end, using Story Grid as my guide. I highly recommend Story Grid so far. Check back next month to see how useful it turned out to be.

I have two other projects going as well, but I ought to wait to tell you about them. Next time

And here’s what I read in January

The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell – was his debut and the weakest of his Cameroon books, but still charming and funny. Durrell was younger when he wrote this, and was more prone to impatience and ego-fragility. Although he extends great humor and compassion toward animals, he does not always do so toward his fellow humans.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker – a funny and useful primer on logic wrapped in thin politics. I stopped reading this book twice before I managed to push past the introduction. The conclusion is also weak, but the body of the book makes a good case for the development of critical thinking skills and rational discourse and helps the reader do just that.

Sphere by Michael Crichton – Solaris under the sea, but much more exiting. I listened to an abridged audiobook of Sphere when I was in middle school, and I can still rattle off whole sections of it. Going back to Sphere for the first time as an adult, I found out it had sexual and racial tension (not badly handled, either), a lot of fun technical lecturing, and a plot that fits together like a wrist watch. Crichton was a master craftsman, and worth emulating.

The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams – not as good as Miles Vorkosigan, but not bad either. This is the first new (to me) scifi series I’ve enjoyed in a while. I had tried the sample and failed to find traction, but I gave the book a second try because George R.R. Martin compared it to Bujold and Weber. I don’t actually like Weber, and I like Bujold’s work better, but The Praxis isn’t bad space opera. The setting is interestingly dark, with the fresh-faced young space-naval officer serving aboard such ships as The Bombardment of Los Angeles for what is actually a species of religious zealots who brutally conquered and cruelly oppressed the Earth…and who go voluntarily extinct at the beginning of the book. There’s a pervasive feeling of what now? Even as the main character climbs the ranks of the space-navy, what’s the point of the space-navy? Ah, a rebellion. Phew! There’s quite a lot of high society partying that almost succeeds as comedy of manners, but the romance and mystery do not succeed at all. I wish Williams had developed the theme more.

Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most by Greg McKeown – good general advice without backup. I appreciated the hell out of the message of Effortless, which was “get out of your own way.”  Many of us suffer under the assumption that hard work is good work, a mis-belief which McKeown does a good job of debunking. But then he doesn’t offer us much in the way of what we should do instead. It’s easy for him to say, “Make the impossible possible by finding an indirect approach,” but he doesn’t go much in to how you find an indirect approach. I’m left without a tool he’s proffering.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Pavlina (my wife) hates this book, and I understand why. Algorithms (simple sets of rules or patterns of behavior) tempt you into thinking that you don’t have to think any more. Why not just program the right habits into yourself and let your body goes through the appropriate motions? I used to do that before I realized I wasn’t experiencing my own life.

That being said, sometimes you don’t have time to run through all the possible ramifications of a given choice, and for that you do need good rules of thumb. I think the ones Christian and Griffiths provide are pretty good: take chances, set priorities, be conscious of your ignorance. Pavlina hated Algorithms to Live By, but this is my review and I liked it. It’s a good companion to How Not to be Wrong.

Astral Codex 10, the blog of Scott Alexander – fun and informative, occasionally off-putting, but not obnoxious about it. I mostly subscribed to this blog because I wanted to know what happened to the author of Unsong. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Alexander is going to write another novel, but does seem to be running an interesting organization. I don’t actually agree with quite a lot of what he says, and I think the Rationalist community could do with some new blood. But I appreciate Alexander’s humility, compassion, and commitment to thinking his ideas through. And he’s funny. I wish more commentators were like that.

Persuasion – a liberal community trying to carve a niche for itself on Substack. I’m not sure about this one yet. I followed my hero John McWhorter there, and I found some pretty good news and podcasts similar to those made by the Economist. My fear about Persuasion is the fact that it’s a community, and as such has a tendency to identify enemies and define itself in opposition to them. It does a good job of telling me I shouldn’t be scared of what’s scaring American Progressives and Conservatives, but then goes and tells me what should be scaring Liberals. That’s more tribalism than I’d like.

Phew. Sorry this newsletter took so long to get out. The first week of February was nuts…but that’s another story.

See you next month

Paul and Dan on Atlantis

Paul and Dan on Atlantis (by Carlo and Renzo Piano).

We talk about architecture, beauty and goodness, optimism and pessimism, civil society, not being cool, and conversation in general.

 

Paul and Dan on Deep Work 4/4

Paul and Dan on Deep Work (by Cal Newport). I push back and say what I like about Deep Work. We discuss being driven to distraction, unplugging, lentil soup with spearmint (it’s just not for me), and the difference between fear and self-care.

See also Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky Chatter by Ethan Koss The Craftsman by Richard Sennet (see our video review in this series)

Paul and Dan on Deep Work (2/4)

Paul and Dan on Deep Work (by Cal Newport). We discuss Books of Hours and manga, the law librarian, being part of a community, Dan’s communication class, hitting your thumb with a hammer, and horses in New York.

Junction is on sale

Here’s something splendid:

Junction (my specbio scifi mystery novel) is on sale from the 18th to the 23rd. Get the ebook version for just $0.99.

(picture credit goes to Franz Anthony )

Here’s something splendid:Junction (my specbio scifi myst...

Here’s something splendid:

Junction (my specbio scifi mystery novel) is on sale from the 18th to the 23rd. Get the ebook version for just $0.99.

(picture credit goes to Franz Anthony )